23. Sigh, I wish I could say the same

Then again, last year was my first year to break 6 figures, but with an autistic teenager with many health problems and now, estranged from hubby and paying child support (which I willingly and happily pay), I think it's fairly easy to spend it.

13. I know its early, but....

I had to do a double take as I too thought this was from The Onion..... WTF? Really? A single parent wi/$260K in annual income? A retired couple with $180K in annual income? My single parent friends are lucky if they can make $40K a year- and retired couples? My parents are in their 80's and my mother still works part time- $180K? That's a dream for them. Jeezus, where do they get this crap? Better send the waahmbulance to help these poor poor individuals with their "pain".

15. You think it's EASY getting by on only 379K a year?!

You have no freaking idea what it's like to be a middle class person in this country!

Obviously I am not going to live in a ghetto, but that doesn't mean we all live in mansions! We live in a modest 3200 square foot house in a gated subdivision. Did I say house? It's a money pit! Even the little things add up to serious money. Just paying the pool boy costs a fortune and it's not even that big of a pool! The groundskeepers are $550 a month, and that's a bargain I only got when I threatened to call immigration on them. Then we've got the housekeeping service, and that isn't cheap. You'd think for what we pay them they would do the outside third story windows, but no, we have to pay a window company for that as well. It's a scandal.

Nothing is cheap these days. Not for any of us. My son Prescott came home crying the other day. It seems he wandered outside the walls of our community and was set upon by a gang of hooligans who made fun of the way he was dressed. He ran away, as we have tought him, and these criminals followed -- still yelling insults -- until they were stopped by the security at the gate. Prescott was inconsolable. His hat -- a jaunty bowler he selected himself on his last trip to London -- fell off when he fled, and not being suicidal I wasn't about to venture out there to retrieve it myself, so I had to have a new one sent next day air. So there's that bill, plus the intensive therapy Prescott will need after his ordeal. He graduates from Marbury Academy next year, then it's off to college, so we have that to look forward to as well.

My daughter Penelope adds her own expenses. She too is still in therapy -- we won't go into why. Plus she does dance, gymnastics, and equitation. Her horse alone is setting us back a fortune, never mind the stable fees and the groomsmen, but my little princess is worth it!

Anyway, like I said, it's not exactly easy being middle class. $31,000 a month only goes so far. We are struggling exactly like the rest of you. I am only thankful that President Obama decided not to raise our taxes -- I don't know how we would get by.

42. These people really do exist

16. Words like "suffer" and "pain" don't apply at those income levels

This is the rhetorical trick the right has been using for decades: define suffering applicable to middle class and lower incomes and expand it proportionally to upper incomes. There is no way an upper income person has a greater tax "burden" when their taxes increase 5%. A burden is a weight on the body. A working class person feels taxes as such a weight because they use their bodies in actual labor to generate income and any shortfall of that income affects their bodies and those of their dependents -- less money for food, health care, etc. At some point embodied metaphors have to mean something and if words like "pain", "suffering", "onerous", "burdensome" and "relief" can apply to financial wealth then the rich must be far more sensitive and delicate than the rest of us. Perhaps the expansion of personal wealth actually does expand one's vulnerability to pain. If so, higher taxes could be seen, long term, as a blessing to the rich.

29. Kidding aside, there are a whole lot of folks doing VERY nicely in this country

There are millions just in the top couple percent, and a whole lot more doing damn near as well.

The problem is the divide between those doing fine, and those who are not. America's largest employer is Walmart. Most of the rest of the largest employers are similar type jobs, all paying as close to minimum wage and zero benefits as possible. Walmart checkers average about 17K a year, and for jobs of this type that's not that bad. Unfortunately, for much of the country that's all there is. You are either wealthy as Midas or you are poor as dirt.

But this is what WE wanted.

Democrats passed NAFTA. And that, as they say, was that. This agreement, and others like it, was the end of unions, prosperity, and the middle class. With the stroke of a pen we became a retail service economy, and we condemned our children to poverty.

I say we, but I am being nice. My generation had nothing to do with it.

30. Something I have noticed is I see a disproportionate

number of senior citizens eating in restaurants especially higher end ones. The reason is not SS pays so much but a large percentage of us worked good union jobs that provided a good pension. I know I have it a lot better in my retirement than my brother 16 years younger than me will have it. I worked a good union job and they are all gone, his whole life has been a struggle trying to live on non-union low wage jobs. My brother is 49 his company doesn't have a pension and he can't afford to put much into a 401k working for those wages.